Loudoun County’s worst kept secret blew up on social media Thursday as word spread rapidly that area high school students are staging a protest walkout Friday afternoon. The rumors of the protest have been swirling for nearly two weeks now.
The motivation behind the action seems to be opposition to President Trump’s executive order on immigration, as well as concern about Betsy DeVos, the new Secretary of Education.
According to texts and social media posts, participating students will exit their classrooms at 2:30 p.m., around the start of eighth block. Where they go from there — whether they stay inside the school or exit the school is unclear.
Loudoun County Public Schools put out a statement Thursday afternoon:
- The high school principals of Loudoun County Public Schools are aware of a potential student walkout Friday afternoon.
- Activities that disrupt instruction are against School Board policy regardless of the cause or viewpoint of those taking part.
- Principals have met with students planning the walkout and have developed plans to ensure safety procedures are followed if students leave the building. Principals also have let students know this would be treated as a disruption of the school day. The usual discipline involved with being tardy or skipping class would be applied to those taking part in a walkout.
Area residents, many of them parents, quickly took to social media and added their two cents. Some were opposed to the action, saying the children are spoiled and just looking to get out of class. Others expressed admiration for students being politically active and exercising their voices.
Why are you removing comments? Not cool.
Hi Susan. We did delete some comments. I apologize for that. We had tried something different with the story yesterday and put in some of our own opinion. However that just proved to be divisive and created hard feelings. So we deleted the material from the story and then the comments didn’t make sense, so we deleted those too. We are not in the habit of deleting comments but in this case it was necessary.
Good choice. News should be facts, not opinions.
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